Rollo and the Vikings

England had suffered from Viking attacks from the ninth century onwards, still ongoing in the time of the greatest Viking of them all, King Cnut of England and Denmark. Normandy owed its very formation to the Vikings, since it was a Viking raider, Rollo, accustomed to wintering his ships in the estuary of the river Seine, who had first carved out independent rule over the region around Rouen, negotiated in a series of treaties with the kings of France according to which, by the 920s, the whole of the province of Rouen, from Eu and the river Somme in the far north, to the bay of Mont-St-Michel and the frontiers of Brittany and Maine in the south-west, was placed under the power of Rollo and his heirs, ruling now as independent counts, later as dukes, no longer directly answerable to the heirs of Charlemagne. Just as English history had been founded upon myths of nationhood, so the Normans commissioned their own national history from a French monk named Dudo of St-Quentin. Dudo deliberately followed Bede in his presentation of the Normans as a people united under one ruler through God’s providence and through that ruler’s wise decision to embrace Christianity. Like Bede, he thus glossed over the fact that the Normans were never a racially distinct people, and that their war bands ruled over a local population still to a large extent made up of the aboriginal Gallo-Roman or Frankish peasantry who had for centuries inhabited this particular corner of France.